About

Anita Holtsclaw is a Brisbane-based artist, who has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Working primarily with screen-based media installations her artworks explore how vision and representation are constructed culturally by cinema and can be reimagined in a contemporary feminist art practice. The screen-based installations present an expanded and embodied field of vision for the viewer to navigate. Recent works such as beyond the horizon (2015), the waves (2014), searching (2014) and palaces (2013) explore concepts of recollection, simulation, and sight. By recreating romantic imagery from cinema and Australian art these works examine how the implicit narratives contained in the cinematic and art-historical landscape mediate our phenemological experience of place. Additionally live and recorded gesture-based performance is utilised as a key element in Holtsclaw’s practice alongside sound experimentation to examine gendered representation and how it can be altered in contemporary art.

Holtsclaw’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at spaces such as The Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) Brisbane 2015, The Institute of Modern Art (IMA) Brisbane 2013-14, Metro Arts Brisbane 2014, Bus Projects Melbourne 2012, Seventh ARI Melbourne, 2013, and the Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS) 2006. In 2014 Holtsclaw completed her doctoral studies titled To See and Be Seen: Cinematic Constructions of Gender and Spectatorship in Contemporary Screen-Based Art at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and won the inaugural Visual Art Showcase Award. Holtsclaw is a Co-Director of Brisbane Based Feminist Collective LEVEL and a founding Co-Director of Boxcopy ARI.